I noticed that someone had been trying to hack my accounts. I think I was lucky enough to catch them in time and change all my passwords. However, during that time I noticed just how long it had been since I had even looked at this site. When I looked at the page I noticed that Firefox was blocking a pop-up. I have never had pop-ups on any of my sites. Then my Sophos anti-virus popped a warning that it had blocked a Trojan coming from this site. WTF?

So my apologies to anyone who came to this site and was not properly protected from malicious code. Somewhere along the line, someone figured out a way to add code to one of my web sites files without altering the modify date and time on the file itself. I have no idea who, how or why, but I will be adding a few extra bits of security. I am relatively sure that I fixed the problem but if anyone notices anything else, please comment or send an email. If you have looked at this site at least in the past month or two and didn’t get prompted for a virus and you saw a warning about a pop-up or a pop-up then I highly suggest you run a full virus scan.

I swear if I could find out who was responsible for this I would send Stan over to visit them in the night and pretend they were a goat….

OK, here is the situation. All of my artwork, scripts, writing and other personal data have always been kept on a 4GB USB drive clipped to my key ring. This has worked for a long time. Knowing how important all this stuff is to me and the potential for losing stuff this small, I set up a routine for backing up my USB drive to a 500GB external drive. In turn, that external drive would echo its data to a second 500GB external. All good stuff that I set up while I was still living in Hong Kong.

Then came the move back the United States. And finding a house. And buying cars for me and the wife. And having a baby. And moving and unpacking. Not only did the frequency of updates slow down because of all of this, but something even more sinister happened. Since I wasn’t paying as much attention to the site and the updates, I also forgot about the backups.

And as fate would have it I lost my 4GB USB drive a little over a month ago.

I was pissed. I had only used it less than 24 hours previous to realizing that it was missing. Then I was depressed as it had a lot of personal information on the drive. Enough that I really hope that the drive is destroyed instead of in the hands of someone who would want to use that information against me. Then I checked my backups.

That’s when I got really depressed.

The last backup I did of the drive was on Halloween of 2008. Enough to capture the data for my now infamous Halloween comics which is good. But considering everything else, I had lost a lot of data. I guess I should count myself lucky that I even had that backup but losing six months worth of art, assets and scripts is a huge blow to me. I don’t have a lot of time anymore to work on the things I want to work on so this really hit me hard.

So now you know why the updates have stopped here at A Little Scary. All is not lost, but I’m going to have to do a lot of work to get things where they need to be. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to start posting comics again either later this spring or at worst this summer. Earlier if I can get my crap together and start working on that instead of drowning my sorrows in Fallout 3.